Comment by jacksmith21006 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacksmith21006 | Hacker News Reader

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I have tried to use Google alternatives a few times and always go back. Now I also been using Google for a long time and so they have my data and I probably have learned how to use Google efficiently.

One of the biggest difference is something that happened very recently. Google is much faster at updating then the alternatives for some reason.

I suspect it is about event driven versus polling. That Google is given update when things happen from trusted news sites instead of having to poll or crawl for new things. Would not be surprised Google just has a lot more of these connections than MS has.

But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.

A big one is my ISP is allowed to sell my data without even me knowing. So I use Google DNS instead of my ISP and also use YouTube TV. All to try to keep my data away from my ISP.

My biggest issue is companies being hacked and people getting my data like what happened to Yahoo. I just trust Google better able to protect.

> But I am probably unusual in that I now just try to keep all my data at Google instead of it being spread around.

I made just the opposite choice, instead trying to offer different parts of my data to different companies. That way, when one company gets hacked, changes its terms of service, gets bought, etc., my losses are limited.

This is key. You can't keep all of your data off the Internet, but you can guarantee nobody can see all of it by trying to prevent your various internet identities from being linked or associated, and keeping data siloed in different, disconnected services.

There's a couple things I do still use Google for, like YouTube. But since they no longer have 95% of my personal data, the impact of them having my YouTube history is drastically reduced.

Firstly, it is quite difficult to manage so many usernames and passwords, for non-tech-savvy people such as my parents.

Secondly, don't you think that actually maintaining it is very difficult? One inadvertant click could expose one of those accounts to another with a different service provider, etc. Arguably, it can work should you define a different browser profile for each of those accounts!? Nonetheless, it is neither easy nor smooth, in my opinion.

If you are that worried about your ISP selling your data sign up for a $5 a month DO/Linode instance and look at a VPN (or it's slightly easier to setup cousin, sshuttle if you are a linux user).

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